Frantically Justine tried to figure out what time it must be in Paris at this moment at just after five in the evening in New York. Add six hours, that made it past eleven at night. Didn’t she have to add in the travel time too in order to figure it out? Her mind wouldn’t work. She’d send that fax immediately, but by now it was too late. Or maybe not, maybe nobody from Necker’s knew yet. Oh, shit, as if Necker himself wouldn’t know she wasn’t there. He’d probably met the plane.
Feeling increasingly incredulous at her own behavior, Justine tried to recapitulate the events of yesterday. She’d been in a terrible, gloomy, evil mood all day, and then, forgetting to send the fax, she’d gone home and calmly had a cup of tea and interviewed a contractor, had an unexpected evening with him and gone to sleep. Today she’d worked all day, with a fax machine no more than twenty feet away, and now, only now, at least a day too late, she’d remembered. And it wasn’t as if she needed a fax machine to alert Gabrielle d’Angelle, she could have phoned her yesterday, right up to the time that Frankie’s plane had landed. The fax was preferable because you could lie more easily on paper than in person.
Somewhere, embedded in all of this, was the reason why she hadn’t sent the fax, Justine told herself, thinking hard. She was a clearheaded woman who simply did not allow herself to behave in an irrational way. It must have something to do with her mood of yesterday, something related to that paranoid but recurrent fear that Necker might suddenly materialize physically in the doorway, a notion that had haunted her ever since the search for the Lombardi face had been settled. In the space of a phone call she’d found herself trapped and powerless to deny this chance to her girls.
But not powerless, after all, Justine realized. Not so trapped that she could be manipulated! She’d shown him that, by God!
“Hah!” Justine shouted as she finally understood that she’d forgotten to send the fax on purpose. She’d known that Frankie could be counted on to handle the situation and she’d known that Necker would understand that his entire elaborate plan had failed. She’d rejected him again, and without having to send so much as a word on paper. What an amazingly efficient subconscious mind she had, she thought triumphantly. It had known that it wasn’t enough to send Frankie in her place, it had also arranged for her to “forget” to send the fax.
“Good show, old girl,” Justine said, congratulating herself out loud in the empty office. After a few minutes of victorious musing she found that as her elation faded, the big booking room was beginning to feel cold. She took herself into her own office where the windows didn’t leak as much air and sat down behind her desk, where a lamp was still switched on. Her eyes fell on a framed photograph of her mother holding her as a baby, a picture so familiar that she no longer really looked at it. Suddenly Justine felt curious enough to pick it up and study it intently. Her recent actions toward Necker had made her feel closer to her mother than ever.
Justine picked up a magnifying glass and concentrated her attention on her mother’s head. Helena Loring had been a true beauty, she decided with professional dispassion. She was just over twenty in that photograph, and allowing for the changes in hair and makeup in the last thirty-three years, she could have had a modeling career if she’d wanted it.
But of course that would have been too chancy, with a child to support. No, her mother had chosen a path that would, before all else, protect her daughter from the ups and downs of fortune. She had given herself entirely to her department store job. As she thought about it, Justine realized that she herself had never truly understood what sacrifices her mother must have made to give her the best possible upbringing.
Justine counted her advantages. She’d gone to the best private school in the city; she’d been encouraged to invite her friends home; she’d had ice skating lessons and ballet lessons; every summer she’d been sent to a fine camp in Upper Michigan, and for as far back as she could remember, she’d had all the appropriate pretty clothes any little girl could want. Tears came into her eyes, as she thought of the woman who had loved her so much, a mother who had never burdened her with a sense of guilt in return for her devotion. How many daughters could say that? Whatever she did to Necker would never be enough to make up for what he’d done to her mother.
At least, Justine thought, putting down the photograph, her mother had lived to see her successful, with her own flourishing business, a kind of security her mother hadn’t felt working for others, no matter how much she was valued. She’d always encouraged Justine to look ahead to the years after modeling, and even in her early twenties Justine had been thrifty and on the alert for business opportunities.
Yes, she’d had an advantage that most of the other models didn’t have, Justine thought, she’d had her mother’s forethought and she’d had her own eye for excellence. All through her working years she’d studied the top girls, placed as she was to appreciate every crucial shading of difference between the good-enough model and the potential star.
When she discovered Lulu, who’d just started working as a photographer’s stylist, she’d pounced on the raw material of greatness. In one day she’d talked the shy teenager into going to see three photographers, making an overnight leap from model to model’s agent. Although Lulu had been an immediate sensation, making Bazaar’s cover in her first month of work, the agency business had been terrifyingly rough going. Her fanatical savings from eight steady years of work had tided her over until she was able to arrange a line of credit to cover the weekly payroll. Nothing had been easy, but during those first years Lulu had been Justine’s launching pad into the agency business. Eventually she’d been lured to Hollywood and swallowed up by stardom, but by that time Loring Model Management was a healthy business.
Getting up, Justine moved to the window and looked out at the city she’d loved at first sight. At night, in midwinter, there was a harder sparkle to the lights. The city belonged to the North and it responded to cold by growing brighter and clearer, cleaned by icy winds. She’d hated to leave New York, when after four months of grooming, her agency had arranged for her to go to Paris for additional polishing. Had they any idea of what they were setting in motion, Justine wondered? Did they ever ask themselves how they changed the lives of the girls for whom they arranged those necessary European tours of duty? Now that she was routinely doing it herself, she knew that an agency head had to send her girls off in the same way that parents are forced to shut off their imaginations when they send their kids away to college.
No, not even Willy herself could have known that sending young Justine Loring to Paris for six months was delivering her to the worst man she would ever meet. Frankie didn’t know, they’d never guessed, she had never told anyone on earth about Marco Lombardi.
Marco had been a junior assistant at Lanvin then, only a year older than she, but fatally well skilled in the arts of seduction. If he had involved her in nothing more than a brief physical passion followed by a typical crash and burn, she would never have forgotten him, for he had been her first lover. However, he had not been content with her heart and her body, he had succeeded in possessing her soul. Marco had bound her to him until he became her world, her God. As soon as he was absolutely certain that there was nothing she could deny him, he lost interest in her. With the coldness of a scientist undertaking an experiment, he had told her that to prove her love she must make herself sexually available to his best friend. Thank God, Justine thought, what little remained of her mother’s teachings had given her the strength to immediately flee Paris for New York, but it had taken her years to recover from the deliberate cruelty of Marco Lombardi’s successful attempt to destroy her innocence and betray her confidence. Perhaps she’d never truly recovered. In any case, her first experience with love had been tainted forever.
Today Justine was far enough away from those events of seventeen years ago to understand that there had been nothing intrinsically personal about what Marco had done to her. She had happened to cross his path when he was between women and he
had acted according to his character, his bred-in-the-bone need to possess and destroy. He was not a man who could settle for less with any woman.
Should she have warned the girls about him? Justine had debated the question with herself every minute until they left and finally had come to the conclusion that whatever she said would only have fascinated them and attracted them to Marco. To alert them might be fatal. What female could resist being singled out by Marco for his attention, the thrill of being the one chosen to enter his world? Their young arrogance might well encourage them to prove her wrong. But whichever of her three girls became the Lombardi face would have to be told the whole story, that much Justine had resolved.
Justine sighed deeply. She’d never rest until they all came back safely. What she needed now was a hot bath, a hot cup of tea, a warm evening in her newly cozy house and a good book that took place in a country parsonage in the nineteenth century. With a happy ending.
As her taxi stopped in front of her house, Justine was surprised to see signs of activity inside. Lights were on all over the first two floors and the shadows of men moving about were visible behind her draperies.
“What’s going on here?” she shouted as she burst into her front door.
“We’re draining the pipes,” a workman answered. “Should be finished soon.”
“You’re what! Draining what? Who told you to touch my pipes?”
“Aiden,” he answered and turned to be off about his business.
“Where is he?” Justine demanded violently.
“Basement,” he answered, and rushed away, recognizing your typical crazy lady of whom there is one on every job. Always.
If men were from Mars and women from Venus, contractors were from a black hole in deep space, Justine thought with the still lucid top of her mind while the rest of it glowed in a lurid light and led her down the steps to the basement like a heat-seeking missile.
“What the hell are you doing to my house?” she screamed at Aiden.
He straightened up from his work, industry written all over his face, naked from the waist up. “Justine! I was wondering what had happened to you. We have to get the pipes completely drained so that they won’t freeze and burst. It’s going to be way below zero for three days at least, a weather front straight from the Arctic. The Mayor has closed down everything but essential services.”
“Where, where is that new furnace you promised me, swore to me, would be installed by the end of the day?” she shrieked. “You know that was the only reason I told you to go ahead!”
“My supplier sent the wrong furnace,” Aiden said, justification clear in every word. “It was too big for this basement. When I phoned that idiot, it turned out that he’d been carrying the wrong serial number on his inventory,” he added indignantly.
“What happened to the old furnace?” Justine asked, gazing in disbelief at the empty space where it had stood for so long. Her anger was momentarily displaced by the enormity of what had gone wrong.
“It fell apart when we disconnected it,” Aiden said matter-of-factly. “By the time we found out that they’d delivered the wrong furnace the guys had already disconnected the old one. There was absolutely no way to put it back together again, it’s kaput.”
He’d canceled three appointments today, Aiden thought, appointments to bid on big jobs, so that he could surprise this delicious and fascinating woman with a perfectly functioning new heating system, and instead he’d found himself with a nightmare on his hands. If he hadn’t been apprenticed to a plumber years ago, the pipes would have been serious trouble. He wanted to beat himself over the head with a two by four, but he was a contractor, a leader of lesser men, the building trade’s version of chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and he had to behave with firm resolution.
Justine sat down on the basement steps and burst into tears.
“I trusted you with my house,” she sobbed. “I trusted you and look what happened. My house is going to freeze, my poor house, oh, oh, my poor darling little house.” Sobs shook her body and she bent her head to her knees inconsolably, wrapping her coat even more tightly around her although the basement was hot.
Aiden’s stern contractor’s code of honor faltered and then failed him utterly as he looked at her with increasing dismay.
“Oh, Justine, for God’s sake, please, please don’t cry like that. It kills me to see you cry. I swear the house won’t freeze, it’ll be cold, but there won’t be any damage. Only the pipes might have frozen, but they won’t, Justine, I promise you, nothing will freeze, nothing, I’ve quadruple-checked every last pipe in the place myself.”
Aiden stood helplessly near her huddled, shaking form and forced himself to continue. “Justine, the problem is you can’t live here until I get the new furnace in. There isn’t going to be any heat or any hot water. And no supplier in the city can put his hands on the right furnace over the weekend. I’ve checked every last one of them. Not till Monday earliest, if then.”
“Oh! Oh! Oh!” Her tears flowed twice as hard. Aiden sat down on his heels so that he’d be on her level and tried to stroke her hair to comfort her. Justine jerked her head and slapped ferociously at his hand.
“Don’t touch me, you peckerhead, you evil, evil man, you, you … contractor!” she managed to articulate through her sobs. “You came in here and look what happened, it’s a ruin, my perfect, wonderful, cozy house, everything was fine before you talked me into this, and now it’s all gone to hell, it’s a shell, a freezing shell, oh, oh, how could I have been so stupid? I don’t have anyplace to live, my home is gone.”
“Shit! You’re absolutely right. Oh, damn it, Justine, I should have checked the new furnace before I let them take the old one out—that was pure criminal stupidity—but I was so anxious to get this in for you before the storm that I went against all my rules, I hurried the workmen and screwed up the job.”
Justine finally got herself under control enough to speak without tears. “Is that supposed to be a reason?” she asked, mopping her face with a Kleenex. “You were trying to do me a favor? Is that your point? You were too zealous?”
“Yes!… I mean, oh, what difference does it make what I mean? I fucked up and that’s that, the reason isn’t important. I let you down and I’ll never, ever forgive myself.”
“I’ll never forgive you, so you can forget about forgiving yourself!”
“I know,” he said humbly. “Why should you? Unless …”
“ ‘Unless’?” she said scornfully. “How could there be an ‘unless’?”
“Well, for instance, let’s just imagine that for some crazy reason, without logic, you decided that you wanted to be really bigger than big about this, and you gave me one free pass at being a total fuckup with the understanding that after this I would never get another chance. So you’d spend the weekend in a suite at any hotel in town at my expense and maybe, one day, I’ll be able to convince you to trust me again.”
“Why,” Justine asked in wonder, “why on earth would I want to do that?”
“I don’t have a decent single reason to give you. I just hoped … that somehow, by a miracle, it was in the realm of possibility.”
Justine looked at Aiden from under her wet eyelashes. He was still the same man whom she had trusted last night, as she had trusted no other man in years, except that without a shirt she wanted him … well, even … more, yes, considerably more. Only he’d broken her furnace and rendered her beloved house uninhabitable for three or four days. But certainly not on purpose. Accidents do happen. Nobody’s perfect. If she forgave him, the very pleasant thing that had started last night—whatever it was—would continue. If she didn’t, it wouldn’t make the house warm any quicker. And she hated to seem ungenerous.
“You’d never ever get another chance? Under any circumstances?” she murmured questioningly, weighingly, as if to herself.
“Never! Not ever! And I’d always owe you!”
“Hmmm.”
“Justine, please,” he imp
lored her. “Please!”
“But I hate hotels,” she said gloomily. “They depress me.”
“You could stay with me! I have a huge loft downtown. Tribeca. You wouldn’t even know I was there, if you didn’t want to.”
“Hmmm.” She remained clearly unconvinced.
“And I have great tickets to the Knicks game tomorrow night. They won’t call that off, wouldn’t dare.”
“Hmmm.” She sounded marginally less dubious.
“I have a ton of food, I’d cook for you and clean up and wait on you hand and foot, cups of tea, Gibsons, Tequila Sunrises, milkshakes, whatever you’re in the mood for. And we could explore my neighborhood, think of it as a mini-vacation. And if there’s enough snow, I have skis for both of us.…”
Justine put her hands on his bare shoulders, looking questioningly into his eyes, as if the mention of skis had seriously tipped the balance in his favor. Did she look like a skier to him? Precariously balanced on his heels as he was, he almost fell into her lap. Aiden scrambled up to his feet and pulled her up toward him by the elbows.
“Would you make my bed?” Justine asked imperiously, leaning back and looking up at him. “I hate to make a bed.”
“I’d make it with hospital corners. I make a great bed. I’d give you clean sheets every day.”
“What else?”
“I promise not to lay a single finger on you,” Aiden said. “I swear it, on my mother’s head.”
“That’s more like it,” Justine whispered approvingly. “But what if …?”
“If what …?” he breathed hopefully.
“Oh, never mind. Just thinking out loud.” She succeeded in not smiling at the puzzled look on his face. Men were so hopeless. Pathetic, really. Did she look as if she drank Tequila Sunrises? Or milkshakes, for that matter? He had a lot to learn about her. For some reason her good mood had returned.
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